New research led by the ARC Center of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) at the University of Melbourne demonstrates a new way to make invisible infrared light visible without relying on the expensive detector technology used in today’s infrared cameras.

Infrared is a type of light our eyes can’t see, but it carries information about heat and objects in the environment. It is widely used for environmental monitoring, industrial inspection, medicine and security.

However, technologies such as infrared cameras remain expensive because they rely on specialized detectors that are costly to manufacture and often require cooling.